These chapters showed me that my stereotype of Italian family life was incorrect. I had always imagined Italian families from that generation to be far warmer than what Orsi describes. The huge number of Mafia movies set during that time period that I watched portrayed Italian families obsessed with rispetto and disdainful of outsiders, but also tremendously warm and gregarious with one another. This stereotypical family refused to let its sons and daughters date outside the community, and it had nothing but contempt for those who did not support their families with hard work—but it also wrapped its members in a cocoon of endless gatherings, gifts, and feasts.

Orsi would tell me I was wrong. To him, rispetto was colder and more complex. Mothers denied their children the chance to play or even to go outside; fathers gave their children little except tyrannical posturing. At first, this was contradictory to me. If the chief concern of the domus is to protect its own, why would those within it be so needlessly cruel to each other?

The answer, it seems, is that a family in Italian Harlem was not made up of individuals who cooperated to ensure one another’s well being. The domus was not a family as we know it; it was a body that disregarded the individuals within it, that judges its parents and its children based not on their ability to make each other happy but on their ability to show rispetto to one another and the outside world.

We may think of this structure as oppressive. There can be no doubt that the children of immigrants did. In some cases, it seems, even their parents had lingering issues with it. Yet the domus could not be given up. While it and its emphasis on respect were external, its values were internal. No one taught children rispetto; it was so deeply engrained in Italian Harlem that children merely absorbed it like air or water. It was so pervasive, so deeply rooted in people’s minds, that it was nearly impossible to escape.